Finding Your Perfect Work Living & Working Naturally Also In This Issue: Why We Hate Our     Work  The Original Affluent     Society Finding Your Perfect    Work Survey 7 Steps to Living and      Working Naturally Profile: Purposeful     Living Loving Hands Photo    Essay Resources   by Sarah Anne Edwards   Consider the Lilies   “Behold the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they    spin…. Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither    do they reap.” Matthew 6:26      As I consider the lilies and the ducks that live on the pond    below our meadow, I notice how they are not unlike the     trees that are beginning to bud along the shore or the    little pregnant squirrel that lives among the branches.    They toil not, nor do they spin, but they are all quite busy    at being fully what they are, giving and taking, drinking the sunlight and creating oxygen, breathing oxygen and creating carbon dioxide, fitting together perfectly into the little community of the pond they share in common.             So unlike us. They never seem to be tired in the morning, nor do they seem to complain or resist going about their business of being ducks and lilies and trees and squirrels. In fact, they never seem to tire at what they do. Especially this time of year, they seem quite eager to bring forth their life into the world, to expend it and share it and be it. Yet, despite their eagerness for life, they don’t seem to overdue either, never ending the day exhausted, lolling listlessly on the water or lying prostate on the ground.                 Why are we so different? Why is our work toil? Why do we so often feel exhausted not only at the end of day but even when we wake up to begin the day? Why do we collapse so readily onto the couch after our day’s work and yearn for Friday’s to come?       These are the questions I began to ask myself after I became ill nearly ten years ago from overworking and they are the questions our clients are asking as they begin looking for a better way to live and work.  Are they also the questions that drew Thoreau to Walden Pond? Did such questions spur him to conclude “In society you will not find health, but in nature.” where “to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely,” (Thoreau, 1906, p 105, 1962, p 158).  Could the answer to these questions be … because we live so unlike how we would if we were simply being who we truly are? Why Do We Hate Our Work?                               “To live well is to work well.” Thomas Aquinas        “If we didn’t hate it, it wouldn’t be work,” a client told me. That’s what he'd been taught. That’s what many of us have been taught. He never expected to like his work, but he wanted to. Work is called work because it’s unpleasant, he explained, you’ve just got to do it to earn a living.     We dream about what we’d really like to do and how we’d like to live, but we feel compelled in the name of practicality to set our dreams aside to pursue the "good life" our society promises. We’re constantly reminded that life has never been better and in many ways this is true. Certainly we have more material wealth and comfort than at any other time in history. But when it comes to work and our enjoyment of life, doing what we truly wish to do, the picture is not quite as rosy.   ·  We do work we don’t enjoy. “Work is always joyless and exasperating unless one has chosen it for oneself,” wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the late 16th century. Yet so many year later, we still rarely do work we’ve consciously chosen because it fits with who we are and how we want to live. Instead we often sacrifice the things in our personal and family lives that we would truly choose.      Eighty-five percent of us would like to change jobs, says Research Alert,       and at some time in their lives 70% of people would prefer to be their      own boss, but only 20% of those ever do.   · We work an unnatural number of hours. On a typical day in America, 125 million people wake up feeling exhausted. "We are increasingly a 24/7 society," says Dr. Harold Bloomfield, Yale-trained physician and N.Y. Times best-selling author of Healing Anxiety Naturally. “This is an epidemic and an epidemic on the rise." "Many people would gladly get more sleep if they could” says Bloomfield, “but the information age, which was supposed to make everything more efficient, has just made everything more busy."  · We work under chronic pressure and stress. Escalating workloads  and constant threats of downsizing or offshore outsourcing may actually be poisoning our work environments and causing us to fall ill, says Barbara Bailey Reinhold, director of career development at Smith College and author Toxic Work: How to Overcome Stress, Overload, and Burnout and Revitalize Your Career.       "An estimated twenty million Americans are staying in jobs they hate in       order to keep their health insurance - when research indicates that       career dissatisfaction is more likely than anything else to make them       need to use it." · We work in unnatural conditions. We are biologically and psychologically designed to spend many hours each day outdoors in natural settings, say evolutionary biologists like E. O. Wilson, yet most of us spend 90% or more of our lives indoors, often literally in a toxic atmosphere.       The Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration estimates       that 21 million Americans work in offices, schools, factories and other       buildings where indoor air pollution is a problem. · Getting to and from work is exhausting. For those who live in a large city, as most of us do, a 1-2 hour commute to and from work is common and much of that time is spent sitting in traffic congestion, inhaling exhaust fumes and defending against reckless, aggressive or frustrated drivers.                "The typical American would log 203 hours per year just going back and                 forth to work,” says data from the US Census Bureau.            So, we may live well, but we don’t live naturally and it's taking a toll on our health and our happiness. Yet, we accept these unnatural conditions because we’re convinced that to do otherwise condemns us to times past when everyone slaved morning, noon and night at miserable, backbreaking labor just to eek out a bare subsistence living.            There were indeed times like that in our agrarian and industrial past, but it wasn’t always like that. Recent investigations in anthropological economics and other fields paint a quite different picture of our far distant past. Contrary to what we’ve been taught, there was a time long ago when life was considerably simpler, much easier, and in many ways more enjoyable and even healthier than today (Cohen, Mark, 1989). The Original Affluent Society           Prior to 10,000 BCE people worked an average of only 3-5 hours a day, explains economic anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, author of Stone Age Economics. Everyone who could worked to provide enough for themselves and their families and then spent most of their time in leisure and creative activities. (Sahlins, 1972, pp 1-30)  Sahlins refers to life during these times as “the original affluent society.” Had you lived in such times, your parents, family and community members would have watched you from an early age to see what natural talents and abilities you showed. They would have encouraged and nurtured these abilities and invited you to use them in ways that would serve the community. There would be ample opportunity to discover what you personally could contribute to the general well-being of the community. Because societies at that time were small, autonomous communities that were egalitarian in nature, you would have had no interest in being anyone other than your natural self, for all abilities were valued and respected equally. You wouldn’t have been paid for using these abilities because the family unit was self-sustaining. Everyone contributed their talents as needed and there was an ethic of never overworking.         New Zealand-born anthropologist Raymond Firth, for example, describes the Tikopian of the Solomon Islands as having approached work much as anthropologists believe we all did prior to 10,000 BCE. A working party of family, neighbors and friends might leave their village in the morning to gather turmeric on the mountainside. There they would work together at an easy tempo with members of the party dropping out to rest periodically. The atmosphere would be one of labor diversified by recreation at will, a give and take of work and leisure, until the task was done and the party would return home with baskets full of turmeric roots (Firth, 19936, pp 92-93).                      Of the Kapauku tribe of New Guinea, Leopold Pospisil writes:           The Kapauku have a conception of balance in life, "only every other day is supposed to be a working day. Such a day is followed by a day of rest in order to 'regain the lost power of health.' This (pattern) is made more appealing … by inserting into their schedule more prolonged holidays (spent in dancing, visiting, fishing and hunting …). Consequently we find only some people departing … in the morning, the others taking their ‘day off.’”  The more conscientious, Firth explains, might work intensively for several days in order to complete a task, but after such a task is accomplished, “they relax for a period of several days, thus compensating for their ‘missed’ days of rest.” (Pospisil,  p. 145). Notice the qualities in these work values that are missing from our work lives.  Not only is work balanced and interspersed with leisure "at will," but also, there is no competitiveness as to who will get to go to work. No one is excluded from working. There are no auditions or interviews for the opportunity to participate in the work. There is no boss. Who does what and when is self-determining.             As Salhins goes on to explain, in these ancient times we produced to share rather than to consume. Because there was no compulsion to work to our physical or gainful limits, we worked toward enough instead of as much as possible. Work was discontinued when our livelihood was assured for the time being and thus ample leisure was assured as well. There was no sense of hurry and no intervening cultural force to deprive any household of its livelihood. (Sahlins, 1972, pp 56-93).  It is hard for us to imagine such times and certainly we would not want to return to live as our ancient ancestors lived, nor could we. But perhaps they have something to teach us about how we might rearrange our lives to live more naturally so we can “work” less and live more. A Survey: Finding Your Perfect Work                   "Each has his own special gift, one of one kind and one of another."                                                                                                    1 Corinthians 7:7             Our perfect work today would look quite different from that of our hunting and gathering ancestors, of course, but perhaps it needn’t be that different in  nature. Perhaps work needn't dominate our lives, or even define them. It could be an integral part of life instead of the center of it. We could establish a balance between providing for ourselves and enjoying the life we’re providing.     In other words, perhaps work needn't be toil, but instead a reflection of who we are and of the gifts and talents that come naturally to us. Instead of encumbering us to the priorities or schedules of others, work could become a reflection of our natural attractions and proclivity to share, give and contribute as part of family and community.   How might such a life look like for you? Can you imagine it?   Because we get so little support or encouragement in finding our natural talents and discovering how we might draw on them to contribute to life around us, many of us don’t know what we’d really like to do, or if so, how we could support ourselves doing it. So the process of finding your perfect work begins with finding yourself. We can start such an exploration by taking this Lifestyle Survey adapted from our book Finding Your Perfect Work (Paul & Edwards, 2003, pp 82-83) to:   1.  Bring a copy of this Survey and a pencil and paper to a natural outdoor setting you find attractive. Allow yourself to quietly, respectfully and unobtrusively observe all life forms in this attractive area. Notice how they sustain themselves. Notice their relationship with one another, with the earth, with the atmosphere.      If you are tempted to try doing this activity without going outdoors into      nature, you will be surprised at the difference once you do. 2.   Look over the words on this Perfect Work Survey and check those that attract you as being a reflection of what you are most attracted to in life. __ Acceptance    __ Appreciation         __ Challenge                  __ Health __ Admiration      __ Quality                 __ Uniqueness               __ Ethics   __ Mastery          __ Excellence           __ Casualness                __ Morality __ Creativity        __ Originality            __ Social & Civic            __ Surprise __ Comfort          __ Informality                Contribution             __ Freedom __ Fitness           __ Community           __ Variety                    __ Fame   __ Honesty              Service               __ Activity                    __ Financial __ Spirituality      __ Excitement           __ Independence                Security __ Stimulation      __ Risk                    __ Respect                   __ Fun   __ Choice            __ Flexibility             __ Relaxation                __ Fortune  __ Making a         __ Recognition          __ Prosperity                __ Prestige     Contribution     __ Stability              __ Certainty                 __ Leisure __ Wealth            __ Being well           __ Making a                  __ Peace   __ Enjoyment            Compensated          Worthwhile               __ Personal __ Making a         __ Helping and              Contribution            Development     difference            caring for            __ Relationships             __ Calm __ Pleasure              others                __ Wisdom                    __ Time for __ Harmony         __ Beauty                __ Authority                      Partner   __ Growth           __ Fulfilling your        __ Solitude                        and  __ Power                 potential             __ Being liked                     Friends __ Privacy           __ Status                __ Accomplishment        __ Time for __ Pets               __ Popularity           __ Competition                   Children __ Nature            __ Achievement       __ Novelty                   3. Look at the words you have selected and notice how these qualities of life are reflected around you in nature.    4. Sort the words you’ve chosen into three lists:     Those your current work provides fully.     Those your current work provide some of.     Those your current word provides little of.  5. Complete this sentence in three different ways to reflect your experience:     This experience in nature shows me I am a person who enjoys …… 7 Steps to Living Naturally in an Unnatural World             After returning from this activity to our manmade lives, it may seem improbable that we could live more naturally and simply like our ancestors. But despite the demands of our modern world, it is still possible and perhaps essential to our mental and physical health to find ways to do so. Many people are starting to realize this and seeking ways to live more in accord with their inner nature.               Here are six steps you can explore for living your life more naturally:     1.  Work for yourself. – Our ancient ancestors worked for themselves. That means they were able to decide how much work was enough and how to integrate it into the structure of each day. They also controlled their means of production and the product of their labors. We can do the same and millions of us already are. In fact, the fastest rate of job growth in our country right now is among the ranks of the self-employed. (Edwards & Edwards, 2003, p 1) ”As Americans moved off the farm, they became a nation of employees rather than proprietors, becoming wage earners and modern-day sharecroppers rather than equity-empowered stakeowners. That must change,” says Jake Gate, author of The Ownership Solution.              2. Do Work You Love – All of nature works on attractions. We don’t have difficulty motivating ourselves to do what is naturally appealing and attractive to us. Firth describes how, for example, when the Tikopian peoples set about their work, they gravitated toward various tasks in accord with who was attracted to what, one doing most of the clearing, others digging and replanting and nearly all cleaning and sorting. Following our natural attractions, we too can work more naturally by shunning what we think we should do in favor of what we actually want to do.    Rousseau shocked the French philosophe when he forsook his quest for fame to lead a “natural life.” He realized that the effort of abstract thinking, even though he had accomplished it so well, was foreign to his temperament. He instead chose to live as himself and enjoy what he called the “tranquility of spirit.” He worked for the reminder of his life as simple copyist, creating his own life, doing his tasks when he liked as he liked. (Rousseau, 1782)            3. Cut Costs of Living.  Spend money only on things that truly matter to you so you can work to live, not live to work. “Our lives have become mediated by money,” David Korten points out in his book The Post-Corporate World. “The institutions of money … hold the power of life and death over virtually everyone (Korten, 1999, p 30). But we can take our power back by consciously asking ourselves what do we need? What do we really want? We can decide if, how much and on what we want to spend our money.           There's a big difference between "making a living"           and making a  life, say Joe Dominquez and Vicki           Robin, authors of Your Money or Your Life.They ask,           ”Do you spend more than you earn? Does making a           living feel more like making a dying? Do you dislike           your job but can't afford to leave it? Is money          fragmenting your time, your relationships with family          and friends?” If so, it’s time for a change. 4. Work from Home. Until the Industrial Revolution, most people worked from home, not always at home, but from home. Home was the base for all aspects of life, creating a seamlessness between leisure, work and caring for one’s household. Even many Roman homes had home offices. Over the past 20 years in an effort to better balance their work and personal lives, millions of men and women have decided to bring their work home, usually working for themselves, but sometimes in salaried positions.   “Life and livelihood ought not to be separated, but to flow from the same source, which is spirit,” says Matthew Fox, The Reinvention of Work.             5. Team Up  with others. In reading about our hunting and gathering ancestors, we note that they lived in small tribes or communities of families and did virtually everything with a little help from family and friends. People worked for themselves but not by themselves. They were on their own, but to be successful they were not alone. The same is true for self-employed individuals. They team up for success. In our book Teaming Up, Paul and I discuss a myriad of ways we can join forces with other individuals to support one another in developing a secure income base, from bartering and cross-promoting to referring business to one another. In our community we’re starting a Shop Local First campaign. There are no passengers on spaceship Earth; only crew.”     Buckminster Fuller                                                                    6. Build Community.  As you may have noticed earlier, economic anthropologist Sahlins points out that if we lived in the times of our early ancestors we would not be paid for our contributions to the community. Community life was composed of volunteers, everyone pitching in to contribute what they could. Although social bonds are one of the most powerful predictors of life satisfaction, in his book Bowling Alone (Putnam, 2000), Robert Putnam documents how civic involvement has been a causality of our 24/7 corporate lifestyle. Instead, we pay for virtually everything we need help from cleaning up the back yard to caring for our kids and the cumulative price is a heavy one, both financially and personally. But in a world where people work from home on their own, we can once again pitch in to help one another and increase our health, wealth and happiness.    As my novel Sitting with the Enemy dramatizes, informal community volunteer efforts take nothing more than a desire to help. But many communities are also creating formal barter or local money systems.   In their book Time Dollars, authors Edgar Cahn and Jonathan Rowe describe how to create an exchange system for trading services with others. For example, they write, “A retired secretary types poetry written by a neighbor with multiple sclerosis, and the neighbor repays her by reading the newspaper to the secretary's blind daughter. Elsewhere, a retired teacher tutors a 12-year-old boy in English and he mows her lawn periodically.'' In Ithaca, New York, HOUR Notes is a local “script” or money system, whereby local community members exchange services like plumbing, carpentry, electrical work, roofing, nursing, chiropractic, child care, car and bike repair, food, firewood, gifts, and thousands of other goods and services, including mortgage and loan fees. Find out more at www.ratical.org/many_worlds/cc/CED.html         7. Spend More Time Outdoors.  As a species we evolved in a natural environment interacting with the natural rhythms of life. But today we spend over 90% of our time indoors, cut off from nature’s non-verbal lessons and nurturance. Research shows that even having a window that looks onto trees can reduce the amount of stress and conflict in our lives. Ecopsychologists also find that the more time we spend in nature, the more connected we become to our own nature, which is the best guide to discovering and creating the life we want to live (Cohen, Michael, 1997).   “I went to the woods,” Thoreau wrote, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life … I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”  (Thoreau, 1962, pp172-73).                                                                                             A Profile: Barbara Harmony                            Purposeful Simplicity  Water activist and astrologer, Barbara Harmony was working for the city of Hoboken, N.J. in 1974 when she grew tired of the urban lifestyle. "I didn't want to leave the house because I didn't want to give up my parking space," she recalls with a laugh. So she decided to pack what belongings could fit into her Volkswagen convertible and drove southwest, searching for a simpler way of life. En route to nowhere specific, she was invited to the wedding of a friend in Northwest Arkansas and decided to stay. She and her former husband remodeled a small home north of Eureka Springs in 1978 where they raised their son. A gentle, soft-spoken woman with a generous laugh, Barbara still lives with her cat Alice and her rooster Koko-da in that same little house in the woods where she has lived for the past 26 years.  She refers to her lifestyle as Purposeful Simplicity. “I heat the house with a woodstove and have a compost toilet,” she explains. “I collect water from my roof into a cistern, that I am currently decorating with broken pieces of pottery and tile. I enjoy my garden and eat locally grown food.” As a result of her simple lifestyle Barbara is able to do the work she loves without financial concerns. She does astrological readings and teaches Reevaluation Counseling, a method of peer counseling.  She teaches an online class about healing springs for Eureka Spring Online Learning, www.eurekaol.com, and is a cofounder and coordinator for the National Water Center that has published two books, the environmental classic, We All Live Downstream, and Aquaterra: Metaecology and Culture. She also actively spearheads water preservation efforts such as One Clean Spring to reconstitute one of the Eureka Springs 66 freshwater springs.           Barbara describes her life's purpose as encouraging people to live in an aware manner in the midst of a non-thinking, consumer society. "Some people say they see a different possibility for life when they come to visit," she says. You can read more about her work and her life at www.ipa.net/~peace.   While not all choices to live more naturally are as dramatic or as simple as Barbara’s, her life illustrates the breadth of what’s possible when we decide we want to follow our inner nature. If she can live her dream, think how feasible our own dreams can be. To read more stories of how others have found fulfillment following their inner nature, click below:   Following the Call of the Wild: Llama Adventure Tours           Living on the Road: Dashboarding            Living Rent Free: Caretaking   Resources Listed in This Newletter     Cahn, Edgar, and Rowe, Jonathan (1992) Time Dollars: The New Currency That Enables Americans to Turn Their Hidden Resource-Time-Into Personal Security and Community Renewal. Emmaus, PA: Rodale.   Cohn, Mark Nathan (1989). Health and the Rise of Civilization. New Haven, CN: Yale University. Cohen, Michael (1997). Reconnecting with Nature. Corvallis, OR: Ecopress. Edwards, Paul & Sarah (2003a). Finding Your Perfect Work: A New Career Guide to Making a Living, Creating a Life. New York: Tarcher Putnam.   Edwards, Paul & Sarah (2003b). Why Aren’t You Your Own Boss? New York: Prima.   Edwards, Paul &  Sarah (1999).Working from Home, Everything You Need to Know to Live and Work under the Same Roof. New York: Tarcher Putnam.   Firth, Raymond (1936). We, the Tikopia. London: Allen and Unwin.   Fox, Matthew (1994). The Reinvention of Work: A new Vision of Livelihood for Our Time. San Francisco: HarperCollins, pp. 1-2.   Gate, Jake (1998). The Ownership Solution: Toward a Shared Capitalism. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, p. 219.   Pospisil, Leopold (1963). Kapauku Papuan Economy. New Haven. CN: Yale University Publications in Anthropology No. 67.   Putnam, Robert D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1782). Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Ten meditations written by Rousseau late in life, published posthumously. Translation by Peter France. New York: Penguin (1980).     Sahlins, Marshall (1972). Stone Age Economics. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.   Thoreau, Henry David, ed. Joseph Wood Krutch   (1962). Walden and Other Writings by Henry David Thoreau. New York: Bantam.   Thoreau, Henry David (1906). The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 5 “Natural History.” New York: Houghton Mifflin. Blessings of Spring Sarah Edwards, Editor                                        © Pine Mountain Institute, 2004 Home  Continuing Education  Newsletter  Books  Contact Us

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